Where We
Live Now
Perspectives on place and policy
humanities and social sciences – the study of peoples,
cultures and societies, past, present and future.
We have three principal roles: as an independent
Fellowship of world-leading scholars and researchers;
a Funding Body that supports new research, nationally
and internationally; and a Forum for debate and
engagement – a voice that champions the humanities
and social sciences.
The British Academy
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London SW1Y 5AH
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www.britac.ac.uk
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Published 2017
Contents
Preface
2
Fiona Reynolds and Deborah Lamb
What is place? The sense and feel of place
3
Phenomenology and place, or: feeling that you live somewhere 4
Jo Vergunst
Billia Croo, Alec Finlay 8
Commentary by Heather H. YeungHoming Instincts and the mediation of screen space 10
Ian Christie
How to capture – and create – place and ‘placeness’?
14
Ruth Finnegan
The Hidden Gardens, Gerry Loose
20
Commentary by Heather H. Yeung
Case study: Pope’s Urn: Twickenham 22
Isobel ColchesterUnderstanding place: its impact on people and relationships
23
Where we live now – why does it matter for our mental health 24
Sarah Curtis
Turnings, Patrick Bond
28
The geographies of ethnicity and religion in contemporary Britain:
how divided? 29
Ron Johnston, Richard Harris, Kelvyn Jones and David Manley
Social Media, Place and Policy
37
Mark Birkin
Shaping where we live for the better: practical approaches
41
Making sense of the place in which we live: ‘more than a feeling!’ 42
Denise Hewlett
Case study: Waterways & Local Places 47
Heather ClarkeLandscaping Change: Exploring the transformation, reconstitution and
disruption of environments through the arts, humanities and social sciences
52
Samantha Walton
The Bindings, Patrick Bond
56
Case study: How the crowd is taking ownership of place, policy and opportunity 57
Jess Ratty and Jason NuttallCase study: People, Place and Collaborative Research 59
Maria Adebowale-SchwarteThroughout 2016 the British Academy
has been exploring the nature of place:
what it means to people, how it features
in policy making and whether it might be
more useful than it currently is as a way
of thinking and planning for the future.
In chapters as varied as Ruth Finnegan's literary journey through place and Denise Hewlett's analysis of the relationship between tranquillity, quality of life and place; to Jess Ratty and Jason Nuttal's lively case study of how communities engage with place through crowdfunding; and Heather Clark's work on waterways as place-makers, we see how academic and policy-related studies are enhanced by using the lens of place. Moreover, as Ron Johnston's exploration of the politics of place and new communities experiencing immigration, and Sarah Curtis' analysis of the impact of place on mental health demonstrate, these are cutting edge issues which need modern solutions. The chapters are interwoven with poetry and artwork drawing on the inspiration of place, and continually reinforce the message that we would all benefit from taking the notion of 'place' more seriously. In doing so, they also illustrate the diversity of places and people's responses to them, and that taking account of this in policy can help us better meet people's needs.
We commend these chapters to you, and encourage you to read them in tandem with the reports of our workshops in Manchester, Cornwall, Cardiff and London, and with our policy document, The case for place-based policy, which argues for bringing place into the heart of policy and decision-making. We thank our authors warmly for their input, and the policy team at the British Academy – especially Jamiesha Majevadia – who worked so hard on the project.
Preface
We have held workshops in four locations around the country, public debates, and discussions within our Fellowship and the academic community.
We've been astonished by the enthusiasm and diversity of people's responses to the idea of giving place much more prominence. This project has occurred at a point when the idea of place has been gaining ground in mainstream agendas; an idea which offers new perspectives and potentially life changing ways of looking at the world and improving people's wellbeing.
Our conclusions from this exercise are published in an accompanying volume to this publication which sets out both the case for better place-based policy making and some practical ideas for taking it forward. The chapters in this document provide yet further evidence of the enhanced insights and perspectives that can be derived from looking at issues from a place-based perspective.
Joint Project Chairs, Where We Live Now
Dame Fiona Reynolds hon FBA
Master, Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Deborah Lamb
The sense and
feel of place
Dr Jo Vergunst, Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Aberdeen
Phenomenology and place, or:
feeling that you live somewhere
Imagine a place, even a room, that you know well; let us say your bedroom. It is almost completely dark, but you need to get up out of bed. You find that you are able
to do so very quietly, without being able to see, and without hitting anything. Indeed, if you are still imagining, you could recreate how you reach out your arm across the darkness to reach the door handle very precisely – there is no need to search for it across the wall. Somehow your body knows the room intimately, its distances, its obstacles and how it affords your passage through it, without your mind really thinking about it. You are still half asleep of course, and perhaps hardly thinking at all.
I am inspired in this small thought experiment by
philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space. Bachelard uses the term ‘muscular consciousness’ to convey how the body knows where it is and how to move around. His book is also a phenomenology of poetic images. He invites us to daydream our way through a house where, he writes, ‘imagination, memory and perception exchange functions. The image is created through co-operation between the real and unreal’.
Consider how you feel differently in a cellar, a kitchen, the bedroom you have just thought about, or an attic... what is it that becomes real in those places for you, or for someone else? Perhaps these are just insubstantial ‘images’ in your mind, but for Bachelard, ‘phenomenology of the imagination (...) demands that images be lived directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life.’ “The feelings we have about places are also an aspect of their reality. ”
Phenomenology is a philosophy of
experience and perception. In my
discipline of social anthropology, it
creates rich and detailed accounts of
places as they are lived in. It explores
how places are made and re-made
from an insider’s point of view.
It encourages deep questions:
•
How do people perceive and come to
know the places they are in?
•
What does it mean for a place to be inhabited?
•
What is the significance of a direct,
unmediated experience of a place, or
in other words, how it actually feels to
live somewhere?
These are questions that might loosen
up our thinking.
Then, if you like, think about how anthropologist John Knight describes family houses in rural upland Japan (in Rival’s book
The Social Life of Trees). Trees are grown specifically to enable the periodic re-building of the house that sustains it as a family home. The growing tree is thought of as a child that reaches maturity, and when it is felled, may begin its ‘work’ as house timbers. The growth of human children in the family house in turn creates labour for forestry, and so the cycle of forest-house-forest continues. For some of Knight’s fieldwork informants, however, the recent practice of building houses in concrete denies the trees the ‘second life’ to which they are due. From a phenomenological perspective, these relationships are not just symbolic in the sense that the house might represent the landscape and the family. They also entail a practical and ethical stance towards place, involving living with trees appropriately, that is at the same time imagined and real. A place is not an object that can be completely described and measured. Its phenomenal qualities – the ways in which the place is for you as a perceptible entity – might be quite different and diverse, and the way you perceive a place will depend on the intentions you have in relation to it: • Are you trying to move through it?
•Find something in it?
•Even change or develop it, perhaps as a planner?
•Or simply inhabit it safely and securely?
Intentionality brings the experience of place into a relation with ideas of time – the past, present and in particular the future, in terms of what they place might still become and what a person or thing might be as part of it. And yet, the phenomenology of place is not simply an account of how subjective experience contrasts to the objective. It is rather an exploration of the grounds of experience and perception that give rise to subjectivities in the first place.
We need some specific language to get to grips with these experiences of place. Another philosopher, Martin Heidegger, gives us some key words: “Heidegger was interested in ‘being-in-the-world’, or how things are, within their places of phenomenal existence, rather than how they can be constructed in the abstract or in an ideal form. ”
It invokes the significance of direct experience and perception, so perception always happens in regard to something, and we are conscious of our own world and not merely conscious or perceiving beings in general. Or try ‘unconcealment’, which is the process by which things reveal their form of being to us. One of Heidegger’s examples is a ceramic jug, whose being-in-the-world, he writes, is as a ‘void that holds’. So as a jug holds water, and pours it out sometimes, it is unconcealing itself. A jug in a museum cabinet that is never used, although it may be looked at, cannot reveal its being in the same way.
How do places reveal or conceal themselves?
Amongst the Foi of Papua New Guinea, according to James Weiner, a place in the jungle is revealed for what it is by a father telling a son its name, which means he has the right to make a garden there. Weiner argues that this naming process does not simply change the ownership of a place but actually brings it into being for what it is. This is also a key insight of phenomenology – that places are not just pre-given in the world but are constantly becoming themselves. The names of Foi gardens will be revealed to some and left concealed from others, and so the place is made present for some but not all. We might say that ways of perceiving places are learned and shared, whether that involves following traces left by others, having things of significance pointed out, or listening to stories of place and coming in time to reflect on their meaning. But who hears and learns is partial – and political.
So here is another story. Imagine that the bedroom you thought of a little while ago was not your own in the present time, but a room from long ago.
“ The phenomenology of place is not
simply an account of how subjective
experience contrasts to the objective.
It is rather an exploration of the grounds
of experience and perception that give
rise to subjectivities in the first place. ”
The Foi people of Papua New Guinea The Social Life of Trees
The particular room I have in mind is in a small croft house built in the early nineteenth century on the side of a hill called Bennachie in rural Aberdeenshire in north east Scotland. It is the dwelling of a poor family, with just a kitchen and a bedroom, made of granite quarried from the hill itself and a floor of hard packed earth, but with a fine outlook down the hillside and across the farmed landscape beyond. It is also a long time since anybody lived there and all that remains now are the lower courses of the stone walls protruding through the grass, bracken and heather around it. Around and about are tree stumps from a forestry plantation grown since the crofters left and now in turn partially felled. In 1859, the surrounding proprietors gained approval for the division of the hill of Bennachie from Court of Session in Edinburgh.
A couple of years ago I helped with an archaeological dig here as part of a community research project. Evidence from the archives and local stories described how the residents of the collection of Bennachie crofts known as the ‘Colony’ set up their homes – working together to erect a house in a day, followed by a celebration at night – on what was understood as common land.
“ Evidence from the archives and local
stories described how the residents
of the collection of Bennachie crofts
known as the ‘Colony’ set up their
homes – working together to erect a
house in a day.”
The settlers became rent-paying tenants, and as so often was the way, rents were increased, other events took their toll, and the Colony dwindled. But on the old earthen floor under the tumbled granite blocks in this house (as heavy for us to carry out as they would have been to build up), we found smashed plates, a brown teapot also in pieces, and other belongings of the family who must have been rapidly evicted before the gables of the house were pushed inwards. It was not necessarily remarkable for nineteenth century rural archaeology in Scotland, but to take part in the dig was a powerful experience. Somehow we could inhabit the house and the wider landscape differently in recognising the violence that ended the house’s life as a dwelling first time around. Its life is now archaeological, which could, if you want, be a tale of how changing economies and class relationships conspired against the family. But it is also a story in itself of smashed plates and collapsing walls as stone quarried from the hill returns again to it. In parts of the Colony, little stands of trees grown by the crofters – holly, laurel, cherry, rowan – somehow survived the conifer plantation. They still mark out and reveal the presence of walls otherwise concealed beneath.
“ It is, in short, about feeling that you
live somewhere, and maybe that is
something that all of us should have
– even if the ‘somewhere’ might be
a journey or a route as much as a
fixed location.”
This is a small and partial story from a corner of Scotland distant from the current centres of political power. Not many of us, either, can make such a connection between the landscape where we live and the materials of our homes, imaginative or otherwise. At Bennachie however we have an open-ended community research project that draws people in to the history of the hill and the make-up of the landscape. I learn above all that the very act of finding out about a place leads to imaginative connections, possibilities for the future, and a new sense of place, even when discovering a difficult history.
Community heritage research often has this dynamic, and it is a field undergoing a resurgence in the UK thanks in part to dedicated Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts and Humanities Research Council funding (e.g. the Connected Communities1
programme). Researching place brings alive and enriches ideas of the past and future as well as the present. This kind of work does not need to be the preserve of ‘expert’ academics, and indeed is usually better when led by or in partnership with communities. It is, in short, about feeling that you live somewhere, and maybe that is something that all of us should have – even if the ‘somewhere’ might be a journey or a route as much as a fixed location. Place, as my colleague Tim Ingold describes, is a collection of lines and paths knotted together, more than a boundary between inside and out. It just takes research on some level to work it out.
1 https://connected-communities.org/
In social science, we often take recourse to the broad structural determinants of politics and economics that are seen as the ‘causes’ of a chain of effects in an analysis of place. But we also need to recognise other ways of understanding, or even feeling, and in particular those that derive from the experience of people themselves. This is important not just for the accuracy of academic accounts, but also for recognising the diversity of how people perceive place and shape their intentions towards it. The kinds of evidence we have for this are not just those collated through large-scale social science surveys, as useful as they may be. We also must pay attention to the personal and the cultural aspects of places that actually provide the firmament for all life. Being open to such a perspective and remembering the significance of the personal place is a possibility for everyone.
A poem by Alec Finlay
Lat.58.972 Long.-3.354
Billia Croo
2 Alec Finlay, excerpt from ‘Billia Croo’. In Alec Finlay, Laura Watts, and Alistair Peebles, ebban an’ flowan (Edinburgh: Morningstar Publications, 2015) 30-32.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
[IV]
along the bay there’s the promise of a new world from each new device connected
to the cable that runs out under the wild rocks,
into the diamond space inside those three buoys –
this is where the metal gets salt-wet : and that’s the only true test – the problem
is elastic : what kind of roots will grip fast with moorings
subject to ebb, flood, flux, in a surge of such force?
[V]
what’s solid was once liquid as with rock and sand which nature divided – like us – these waves were
tugged and formed, in slowness, slowness that we’ve lost, for there’s no way to relearn the tide’s happy knack of infinitesimal
growth, except by sloshing around, or waiting, stranded,
In the liminal space of Billia Croo, where water meets land via red sandstone cliffs and a pebble-beach, we are neither fully landed, or at sea; in terms of achieving a static sense of place, as the nature of the bay changes with the tides and the seasons, we are, therefore, literally and conceptually stranded, and can read how Finlay makes use of this landscaping pun at the end of section V.
This sense of stranded inbetweeness, or liminality, is extended in the second couplet of section V, where the simile turns us away from the impersonal landscape into the realm of anthropocentric observation for a moment; ‘like us’ is as divided as the previous line, its clausal allegiance unclear - split between ‘rock and sand’ and ‘these waves’.
Split between ‘rock and sand’ and ‘these waves’, the human element of the poem is placed at the observation point either of the quarry site (past) or the wave-energy testing site (present); divided also, like most communities now, between the knowledge that more environmentally friendly energy production is a global necessity, and the sense that they don’t want its visible presence in their back yard.
Part of the aesthetic impulse of Finlay’s project was to combine into our appreciation of the landscape these renewable energies (in this case, the ‘three buoys’ of the bright orange Pelarmis tidal energy device), creating a revisionary sense of a powerful ‘new world’, where power itself, and the acknowledgement of its appearance (man-made energy harnessing devices, or ‘the heave of the moon’) is as much a part of our fascination with landscape as its sources. In this poem, we see how it is possible for the global ‘we’ (or ‘us’ of part V) is able to acknowledge our essentially liminal, co-dependent, relationship on both the natural world and our man-made devices through an appreciation of the changing nature of the places we walk past, and in which we live.
Commentary by Dr Heather H. Yeung,
Assistant Professor in English Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara
Billia Croo is a bay on the south-west coast of Orkney’s Mainland. On a clear day on the land above Billia Croo you can see the outlines of the hills of Scotland on the horizon. Named after a particular site, Finlay’s poem of this place is observational, with a characteristic neutrality of voice, for all it also seeks to instruct its reader by indicating different points and processes to observe
.
The full poem was written as a part of a larger collaboration whose aim was, by artistic means, to investigate the ethics and the aesthetics of off-shore wave-energy projects run by EMEC (the European Marine Energy Centre). EMEC is based over four testing sites in the Orcadian archipelago, of which Billia Croo is one (in the last few decades the islands have become laboratories for a host of different marine energy testing; are a ‘centre of excellence’ for research in marine environments and energy production).
Billia Croo, which also used to be a stone-quarry, is situated just south-west of the seam of uranium which runs beneath this stretch of the Orkney coastline made famous in George Mackay Brown’s novel Greenvoe, and Peter Maxwell Davis’s Yellow Cake Revue, and the failed attempt to mine it during the Thatcher administration.
Finlay’s poem ‘billia croo’ takes account of this landscape, noting the changes in environment in terms of both natural and man-made interference and flux, as well as acknowledging the presence of the landscape and seascape in a deep-time continuum of power and energy production, fully attentive to the way we use language and poetic form to denote and translate these things. Energy, just as it is found in and harvested from nature by disrupting a natural process (a wave; the sun; a particle), is produced across Finlay’s poetic lines, as they break and disrupt clauses and even words; ‘connect-/ed’ demonstrating the disrupted ‘surge of such force’, forcing the reader into the production of energy through the process of an unnatural reading movement.
Gavin Pretor-Pinney writes in his study of waves ‘an ocean wave is energy passing through water’. The wave cycle is simply the visual manifestation of the passage of this energy. The movement of the tides is continual. In Finlay’s poem, even the punctuation mimics the continuous motion of the tides: there are no capitalised beginnings nor end-stopping (i.e. use of full-stops) in his lines.
Further Reading
EMEC, www.emec.org.uk/marine-energy George Mackay Brown,
Greenvoe (Hogarth, 1972)
Peter Maxwell Davis, The Yellow Cake Revue (1980)
Gavin Pretor-Pinney,
The Wave-Watcher's Companion (Penguin, 2010)
“ In Finlay’s poem, even the punctuation
mimics the continuous motion of
the tides: there are no capitalised
beginnings nor end-stopping
(i.e. use of full-stops) in his lines.”
Professor Ian Christie FBA, Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History, Birkbeck College, University of London
Homing Instincts and the
mediation of screen space
There are myriad examples. Consider two films that seem to inhabit opposite ends of the spectrum: the Hollywood blockbuster Gone with the Wind, dating from 1939, and the great Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky’s most personal film, The Mirror (1975). GWTW may be the way that audiences around the world have engaged with the American Civil War for seventy-five years – I remember my father taking me to see it, because it was ‘historical’ – but it does so largely by making us empathise with Scarlett O’Hara’s romantic vicissitudes and her deep attachment to ‘Tara’, the mock-Georgian centrepiece of a plantation in antebellum Georgia. Margaret Mitchell’s novel gave the plantation a history, linking it with Scarlett’s Irish father naming it after Tara, the traditional seat of the high kings of Ireland. But in the film, it was a structure erected on the MGM backlot in Hollywood, yet dressed and photographed in highly evocative ways, from its pre-war opulence, to the later stages of Scarlett’s determination to keep it alive. A synopsis of the film records its conclusion, and the intended sense of narrative closure: ‘In the final shot, we see Scarlett silhouetted against Tara as the sun sets over the hill, having arrived back at her childhood home and now facing an unknown, but new, future’.
The title of a book by the
influential English paediatrician and
psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott has
long had a special resonance for
me: Home is Where We Start From.
Whatever we call home is indeed
where we start from when young,
but it’s also what we seek, or perhaps
fear, in many later phases of life. As
a film critic and historian, I’m struck
by how many films depend upon
depicting ‘home’, making us feel its
lasting associations.
Tarkovsky’s film3, made during the Brezhnev era of Soviet
‘stagnation’, drew on his own family history, which saw his poet father leave the family when he was a child during the era of Stalin’s terror, and his mother move to Moscow, where she worked as a proof-reader. But the chronology of the film is deliberately confused, so that we are hardly aware of when any scene is set. What makes it one of the most powerful and evocative ever made is the sense of a mother and her son searching for security, for home. With its dream-images of a house on fire, of a soldier’s return from war, and of a desperate panic over a misprint during the Stalin era that could have lethal consequences, it evokes a lasting sense of unease. We might recall the term that Freud used for things that frighten us, which is normally translated in English as ‘uncanny’.4 The original sense of the German
Unheimliche was ‘unhomely’, although it has come to mean more generally ‘eerie’, ‘scary’ or ‘sinister’. Yet The Mirror’s characters are shown as displaced, literally ‘unhomed’, and much of the film’s power stems from how we share their desire for home without any certainty or entitlement.
Or take another contrast, which I’ve written about recently. What possible connection is there between a Hollywood Western, such as John Ford’s My Darling Clementine or his later The Searchers, and an amateur film made in the part of London where I live? The link, I suggest, lies in our sense of the ‘local’. Even a Hollywood film can create a strong sense of locality, at least for the duration that we are immersed in it. In My Darling Clementine, we spend 90 mins in the historic Tombstone, where Wyatt Earp will reluctantly take on the Clanton family, in the famous ‘gunfight at the OK corral’, and so bring a sense of order to this frontier outpost. No matter that Ford built his version of Tombstone hundreds of miles away from the real town, largely in order to provide it with the backdrop of mesas in Monument Valley that he felt deeply attached to. This may not be an authentic or ‘realistic’ Tombstone, but it’s one we feel temporarily at home in, and could probably even find our bearings in, at least for the duration of the film.
In the case of a truly local film, like many of those we have collected in the London Screen Study Collection at Birkbeck College, what appears on screen may be already familiar to many viewers from their daily life5.A film made in North
London around 1960, Beauty in the Borough, shows many parts of the then borough of Hornsey, emphasising how it has been enhanced by copious amounts of flower-planting. Showing this to a local audience, as I have done in Crouch End, encourages viewers to create their own relationships
with the screen images, noting what has changed and what hasn’t. They may be moved to think about ‘history’ on a purely personal and proximate basis, or to reflect on the course of their own lives, in terms of where they live and have lived, and perhaps aspire to live. Seeing our own home and its immediate surroundings on screen is obviously a very special case in the wider spectrum of our relationship to the representations of ‘home’.
In the case of Ford’s later, much darker vision of the historic West, The Searchers (1956)6, the theme of home explicitly
frames the film. The opening image shows a family of homesteaders greeting their relative Ethan, a Civil War veteran, as he rides in from the same barren landscape that had housed Ford’s ‘Tombstone’ ten years earlier. After the family is savagely destroyed and its daughter abducted by raiding Comanche Indians, Ethan sets off on an epic search, which seems motivated as much by his demons as by family loyalty. When he eventually finds Debbie, now a grown woman living as the captive of the Comanche chief, both he and we are uncertain whether he may kill her out of disgust. Instead, he says ‘let’s go home Debbie’. But when he returns her to a surrogate family, he cannot bear to enter the house, and returns to the wilderness, still permanently ‘unhomed’. The dark frame of the doorway that silhouettes Wayne at the beginning and end of the films seems to signify an emotional threshold between the settled and the vagrant, home and the wilderness.
3 Andrey Tarkovsky, The Mirror (1975)
4 Freud’s 1919 paper ‘’Das Unheimliche’ was first translated into English in 1925. In the Collected Papers vol 4, and has since become a familiar reference-point for those seeking
to explain the deep-seated attraction of scary and grotesque stories.
5 For details of the London Screen Study Collection, part of Film London’s London’s Screen Archives network, see http://londonscreenstudy.com 6 John Wayne as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956)
Still from John Ford’s The Searchers (1956)
“ Seeing our own home and its
immediate surroundings on screen
is obviously a very special case in
the wider spectrum of our relationship
to the representations of ‘home’.”
“ Even a Hollywood film can create a
strong sense of locality, at least for the
duration that we are immersed in it.”
Another film comes to mind: Satyajit Ray’s The Home and the World (1984)7, based on a 1916 novel by Rabindranath
Tagore about a Bengali woman whose whole world lies within the traditional home. However, Bimala starts to aspire to a wider understanding of the political forces disturbing the outside world of late colonial India, which will eventually shatter her seemingly secure home.
Like Tarkovsky, Ray’s films reveal a pattern of attention to and concern about ‘home’. The protagonist of Tarkovsky’s debut, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), is literally detached from any home while working as a front-line army scout, a loss accentuated by his dreams about his mother. Ray’s protagonist, Apu, in a trilogy of films made in the late 1950s has to learn how to survive the loss of his father, mother and young bride, as he discovers his vocation as a writer.8
Another collection of Winnicott’s essays is entitled The Child, the Family and the Outside World, and these explore how we all make our way into the world, starting with one of his most widely admired concepts, the use of ‘transitional objects’ in infancy. This has had some influence on recent film theory.9 However, my own reflections on the emotional
significance of space in film began with trying to understand how designers create settings which do much more than signify ‘where characters are’ – although they have to do this at some level, whether it is ‘the American West’ or ‘an English industrial city’.1 0 In such cases, the task is often to
avoid identifying precisely where, but to convey the ‘feel’ of this type of location. So, production designers, along with cinematographers and directors, are very much in the business of creating what we might call ‘affective spaces’, where we respond to qualities of the places represented, without necessarily being able to ‘place’ them.
Notoriously, of course, filmmaking makes extensive use of expedient places masquerading as somewhere else, often for logistical or economic reasons. Equally, it often ‘joins’ places that are in fact widely separated, for similar reasons. But except for those preoccupied with authenticity, such illusions and elisions are part of the process of creating worlds that we can enter as we immerse ourselves in films. And why do such numbers of us do so, making screen entertainment by far the most popular leisure interest of the modern world? Andrey Tarkovsky likened filmmaking to ’sculpting with time’, suggesting that we enjoy having a different relationship to time through its reconfiguration in film.11 While this may well be true, I would suggest that the
experience is just as much about having space reconfigured for us.
Most films, whether fictional, fantastic or ‘realist’, take us into spaces where we respond to signs of familiarity or unfamiliarity. We have to orient ourselves in an initially unfamiliar space subtended by the screen’s rectangle. What kind of help we are given by the film’s makers will depend on their intentions, and of course on their judgement of our expectations. A James Bond extravaganza will typically place us immediately in an unfamiliar exotic location, which becomes the backdrop for a fast-moving adventure. An English realist film will open in a nondescript urban setting, which voices and accents may help us locate, as we try to decipher the relationships within its small world.
What are the implications of this mode of filmic vision that we have all learned from childhood? Perhaps the most obvious is that through it we have ‘visited’ many more places that we have physically set foot or tyre in.
7 Satyajit Ray, The Home and the World (1984)
8 Initially based on a novel published in 1928 by Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay. The films are Pather Panchali, Aparajito and The World of Apu. 9 See for instance Annette Kuhn, Little Madnesses: Winnicott, Transitional Phenomena & Cultural Experience, Taurus, 2013
10 See for instance, Ian Christie, The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design, Columbia University Press, 2008; and ‘”Merely local”: film and the depiction of locality,
especially in local documentary’, in Francois Penz and Richard Koek, eds.,Cinematic Urban Geographies, Palgrave, 2016.
11 Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (1987), is an English translation of his Запечатлённое время, literally ‘Depicted Time’.
“ Most films, whether fictional, fantastic
or ‘realist’, take us into spaces where we
respond to signs of familiarity or
unfa-miliarity. We have to orient ourselves in
an initially unfamiliar space subtended
by the screen’s rectangle.”
12 Ian Sansom, review of Bayard, How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been, trans. Michele Hutchison, Bloomsbury, 2016, Times Literary Supplement, 17.6. 2016.
13 Roger Odin, ‘Visiting and City, Watching a Film’, trans. Ian Christie, in Marcel Arbeit and Ian Christie, eds, Where is History Today? New Ways of Representing the Past, Olomouc:
Palacky University Press, 2016, p. 75. http://www.reprezentaceminulosti.cz/public/filemanager/Where-is-history-today-_-web.pdf
14 Richard Taylor & Ian Christie, eds, The Film Factory: Russian and Society Cinema in Documents 1896-1939, Routledge, 1994 15 ‘East Coker’, one of the Four Quartets, 1940.
Indeed the selective and codified nature of filmic
representation may give us a more intense sense of place than actually visiting. This extends the conceit of Pierre Bayard’s recently-translated book How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been, described by a TLS reviewer as ‘lit crit à la mode: quirky, ironic… world lit, but not as you know it’.12
Bayard argues that it is often writers who stayed at home that have made places ‘more present than those described by writers who considered travelling to them essential’. If we apply this to the experience of film, then Ford’s transposed Tombstone, or the MGM backlot where Tara was built, have indeed rendered these places vividly ‘present’ for generations of viewers – and almost certainly disappointed location tourists in search of ‘the real place’.
“ The world of a French street that
unexpectedly came to life before
his eyes seemed to Gorky like ‘the
shadow of life’ mainly because it was
monochrome and soundless.”
After more than a century of filmic experience, now multiplied through the many devices that allow us to film our own experiences and anthologise those of others, we may have arrived at the situation where what I am calling filmic vision has actually gained the upper hand. Another French theorist, Roger Odin, has compared ‘the act of visiting a city and that of seeing a film’.13 Noting that much
tourism is managed on screen, through orientation advice and guides, he suggests that ‘to visit a city, or see a film, is to enter a world or more accurately “to produce” a world, a “diegesis” as the film theorist would say’. Technically speaking, both viewer and visitor ‘function as enunciators who build a world from the signs provided’.
Strangely enough, this was how one of the very first writers to describe the experience of seeing a film put it. The Russian Maxim Gorky wrote of having visited ‘the kingdom of the shadows’, after seeing the earliest Lumière films at the Nizhny Novgorod annual fair in July 1896.14 The world of a
French street that unexpectedly came to life before his eyes seemed to Gorky like ‘the shadow of life’ mainly because it was monochrome and soundless. But today, we are accustomed to scenes that are in fact more vividly life-like than much of our unmediated experience.
For the managers of many tourist destinations, the problem is indeed how to live up to expectations formed onscreen. And for those involved in creating new spaces and structures, planners and architects, the technology of ‘walk-through’ simulation has become indispensable.
This is hardly a process that can realistically be halted or reversed. Nor has it been accompanied by any decline in ‘bodily’ tourism. Rather, the two kinds of experience feed off and stimulate each other. Like Bayard, we can ‘draw upon the consequences of the permeability of the boundaries of the space of the work and real space’.
And I would add to this the hope that realising how so much of our experience is mediated may direct more attention to understanding how filmic space works for us, and may even prove profoundly therapeutic. Winnicott’s title was adapted from T S Eliot’s lines Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.Filmic space and vision are undoubtedly important ways through which we learn to understand and navigate the world. As adults, we cannot return to the home we started from, but we can recognise versions of this created in the affective space of the screen, as Tarkovsky, Ray and countless other filmmakers, anonymous as well as great, have done.
Professor Ruth Finnegan FBA, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Open University
How to capture – and create –
place and ‘placeness’?
How has that happened? In the face, too, of social scientists’ disparaging tales of the artificiality, alienation and dystopia of urban life? What features of place - of town, of country - did the idealistic policy-makers and planners take account of to be so apparently successful? Well some parts are better than others and so on; but myself I like the roundabouts and the robust irony of the concrete cows. Were they practical as well as utopian and can we gain greater insight not just from their policies - Milton Keynes is just one place after all - but from a wider consideration of what makes up a 'place'? Beyond that, of our human experience and conceptualisation of ‘placeness’?
For this we need to go wider than the specialities of urban planning, under whatever name, to poetry, music, personal memories, feelings, and more. This indeed fits with the anthropologist’s approach: the conviction that the meaning of a place – or building or settlement – is how people feel about it, experience it, define, indeed create, it for themselves (see for example Feld 2012, Hirsch 1995, Low 2003, Tilley and Kapferer 1994). To investigate that – a perfectly proper thing to do (happily, in the light of the classic work of Turner and Bruner (1986), ‘experience’ is no longer a forbidden or at best marginal concept, as it once was, in social science) – we must explore people’s thinking and emotions, not just the dry ‘facts’. And when we say ‘people’ we can, maybe must, include ourselves too. What nearer first-hand source can we have?
I live in Milton Keynes, that once
'new' city. Supposedly 'a concrete
jungle' and 'cultural desert', it is
now increasingly celebrated - and
studied (e.g. Finnegan 1989/2007,
1998) as the home of musicians
and courageous story-bearers, of
artists and enterprise, lakes and river
walkways, and children growing up
amidst playgrounds, churches and
green surrounds.
Let me, anthropology-wise, build on a series of examples to illustrate place - so much easier to capture and learn from than abstractions. They are largely based on my own experience. Some are in the frame of fiction - but as true, perhaps truer, than ‘reality’ – some are imagined, some sonic, some pictorial. Some will no doubt seem surprising, but ultimately, I hope, will be illuminating for capturing the full flavour and sound of a place.
A small girl experiences the place-ness
of 1940s Donegal
16She was just an ordinary girl in a magical world.
It was just to sit silent on the shore, scooping coarse sand grains in her hands, falling them through her fingers, grain by grain, counted, countless. Or feeling the clouds and the moon, numbering the stars …
Walking to school was a marvel, going home too. The bogs and man-insect-catching (would she ever?) butterwort, marsh grass, heart’s ease, hawkweed, myrtle, asphodel. And the wondrous thistles and the gorse, the ever-flowering hill gorse. And everywhere everywhere the heather, God’s heaven-gift.
Then leaps down the hills and over the turf cuttings and the bogs, more bogs, shoe stuck in mud, carried home, kind ‘uncle’ arms, son from the carpenter’s workshop three fields away – ‘uncle,’ no her first adult Admirer, little did she know: (but her childhood friend of her heart, brother-seeming, ever there). Barefoot was better like her companions, no stuck-in-mud, stumble over ruts sandals pierced through by the bumpy-path-thorns. ‘Ragged urchins’ her mother called them – huh, better dressed than her with tweeds, generation-handed, ‘gainst winter hail, quick-dry hair on heads.
Past the bull, fierce, fearsome, bolt in his rickety shed, no not bolted, don’t you see him staring at the splintered door, locks just just just about, just, to burst (how they laughed and shouted and rapped to stir the beast and told her of the bull that had gored the man beyond the headland to death. ‘‘Cos he’d been teasing it’ said her ma, ‘never you fear...’ but she did). And even if she passed the geese (golden? no! not for her, she knew already that mythic end wasn’t her life), geese, most aggressive of beasts, rushing her with wings, great wings, spread wide, pecking at legs under her knee-high skirt, threatening knee-higher (that was why she always – thoughts flickered away...).
So all her life she was afraid of that, of geese, an’ all that. And then treading across the final, named, most fertile field, the place where mythic Diarmaid slept with his love Grainne, home of the sea-gulled plough, the waving oats, sky-root flax most azure of flowers, and seeing the wisping corkscrew smoke of blazing fire. Miracle orchids, hazels, birch and old old oaks, centuries, unimaginable time to a seven-year-old and tracing the secret fairies’ path under the spring’s thickets to find the violets and soft primrose and sweet sweet sorrel flowers in the ivoried glade, image of heaven. The gentle place, the wood of fairie Tir-nan-g, the ever-youth. And her mother’s ever smile...
The music and poetics of place
Place, and certainly town planning, may seem to have little, if anything, to do with music. But consider for a moment how many musical works are known by the names of places, large and small: The London symphonies (many of them), equally the Prague, Cotswold and Scottish symphonies; the Hebrides Overture; the symphony ‘From the New World’ – not, as often thought, primarily about America but also the expression of Dvořák’s homesickness for his native land. My view of Liverpool will be forever connected to its concert hall and the ‘Liverpool Phil’; and what music-lover can divorce Manchester from its Hallé orchestra and Mendelssohn and JC Bach, Birmingham from the BSO (the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra), Berlin from its Philharmonic, or Venezuela from Dudamel’s great Simon Bolivar Orchestra, and so on through the countries of today’s world.
Little though we may consciously remember such
descriptions, nevertheless there is a sense in which for many people, if only from school encounters, these associations play their part in the felt definition of particular places. There are Ralph Vaughan Williams’ folk tune creations too – the very mark of Englishness – and his ‘Sea symphony’ that, like Delius’ work, create the ocean for us; the ‘London Bach’; the ‘Liverpool sound’; or the associations of Leipzig and Vienna. Is our consciousness of these places not immediately coloured with our experience of the music of JC Bach, then of Mozart and Strauss? Then too there are the compositions that deliberately set out to frame and celebrate a place for us: ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘Long way to Tipperary’, Aaron Copland’s works on America, Sibelius’ ‘Finlandia’: all impact on our consciousness of national identity.
There is the direct effect too of the countless national anthems of the world, in this case not just heard but actively sung in joint performance, probably the most deeply uniting of modes or, nearly a national song, Blake and Parry’s ‘And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green’. Think too of folksong collectors and arrangers. Where would English feelings of national identity be without Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar or Percy Grainger who helped to create our land; or America without John Lomax or Francis Child, and similar collectors in just about every country of the world?
16 Extracted by permission from Chapter 2 of Ruth Finnegan’s Black Inked Pearl, Garn Press New York (2015).
“ Then too there are the compositions
that deliberately set out to frame and
celebrate a place for us: ‘Rule Britannia’,
‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘Long way
to Tipperary’, Aaron Copland’s works
on America, Sibelius’ ‘Finlandia’:
all impact on our consciousness of
national identity.”
Consider also the contribution of poetry to this sense of identity and place. Remember Wordsworth and Coleridge on the Lakes – how could we see them differently after that? – or Browning’s ‘Oh to be in England now that April’s here!’, Gaunt’s ‘This England’, or Brooke’s iconic
If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
Yeats too for Ireland, the land where I grew up and learned through his words. When I think of my first home, how can I not feel and hear his language and poetry? And the folk songs too, grief of Irish exiles recalling their dear land, the land to which, the more attached for this reason, they never plan to return to.
All this may seem marginal, but it plays a very real part in our experience. Nor is it just a thing of the past. ‘Place poetry’ is now a recognised genre with an accepted role in Britain’s GCSE literature syllabus; and the ‘local poet’ from Sussex’s Lewes, Patrick Bond17, not only composes
locally-inspired poems but leads popular expeditions to drink in the atmosphere of the places he poetically celebrates. It can be found, knowingly or not, in literature – in radio, in poems on the underground, in novels and histories and plays (the Merry Wives of Windsor; Kenilworth;
Harrison Ainsworth’s The Tower of London), in the Faber Book of Landscape Poetry, or in the evocation of places in recent novels like Rosie’s Umbrella, my own Black Inked Pearl or, so wonderfully evocative of the place-ness of Jamaica and the streets and dwellings of post-war east London, Andrea Levy’s Small Island. There is the power, too, of memoirs like my mother’s account of growing up in Ulster, and so many others; even more of myths enshrined in the land of Aboriginal peoples in Australia or Celts in Ireland; in the advertisements columns – so different yet purporting to the same end, of popular newspapers. These work to shape people’s sensibilities and meanings. For many this may be not be a fully conscious process. But it is there – a strand in our constructions of place.
And more
Even those who regard themselves as fully rationalists, free from the emotions and sensual overtones of the material world, may still feel the ‘vibes’ of ancient and sacred places. Who can, in all sincerity, be unreceptive to the feel of Stonehenge, York Minster, the amazing ‘cardboard’ transitional cathedral built from the mud of the Christ Church earthquake, or the Agia Sofia in Istanbul, most awesome of human created buildings? Likewise, Carnac in Brittany or the stones of Orkney?
Recall too the works of nature: great rivers, glaciers, crags. The Giants’ Causeway, Kendal in the Lakes, the sunrise across over New Zealand’s great Hauraki gulf. Are these feelings evoked by these sights not also part of our apperception – and thus the reality – of these places? Think also of the colour and sound feel of Orange processions in Ulster or Remembrance Day brass bands winding through particular localities, marking them as their own? And what Irish-rooted American does not throb with emotion during New York’s rituals recreating and re-invigorating ancestral memories of Ireland?
Scents too elicit strong memories of places. I am not the only one, surely, whose recollection of the Irish scenery is immediately evoked by the scent of wild thyme (and vice versa)? Or the feel of Bletchley as it was when I first came here, drenched by its heavy brick fumes? So too no doubt for earlier London dwellers by the smog that once enveloped the city, signature of the London they knew.
Cardboard Cathedral, Christchurch, New Zealand
And of course, pictorial image plays its part too. Landscapes and seascapes run through our interpretations and
memories; Ely cathedral has its existence in our minds in part through its frequent representation in images, films, and book covers, while Andrew Murray’s London, first, with its colour and humour helps us grasp the meaning of that great city and its inhabitants.
In this modern world, what is ‘place’?
Even in this technologically advanced and rapid era, people’s conceptualisations of place and of one specific location, if mostly unquestioned, still runs deep. We recognise and celebrate the notions and experience of one’s own place; one’s birthplace; where I belong; my father’s, grandfather’s place; where my parents are buried; where I or my forebears came from (think of the effort that Americans – not the only ones – make to visit their place of origin). How important these are in self-identity whether for immigrants or long-time dwellers in one place.
It is notable that heaven, Eden, hell and so on, under whatever name, are so often (universally perhaps) conceptualised as physical places. In literature, they are visited only after a physical journey by epic heroes. This comes in much theological writing, too. This is odd when religious gurus from all over see them rather as spiritual states (not places) or as alternate dimensions of existence – yet the notion of place still forces its way through.
Specific items of culture too are sometimes thought of as originating from a physical location, though the specific place can change. In the Fiji of the 1930s, for example, music essentially ‘came from’, was located in, ‘belonged to’ faraway Britain. Now it belongs to the land of Fiji, located there as well as emanating from there to the new Fiji-Indian diaspora in Australia (Finnegan 2016). In the 19th century music came from and belonged to Germany (England was Das Land ohne Musik) but no longer; it has travelled the world. How is a country conceptualised? As a place? New Zealand is seen by native born and immigrants alike in terms of place, or at least of land or landscape – the island fished up from the sea by Maui in ancient times. Even those who dismiss the myth can be unconsciously swayed by it – Aotearoa, ‘land of the long white cloud’: the name itself carries its vibes. As a native of Northern Ireland, I think of ‘Ulster’ mainly as a place, one characterised by its distinctive language and culture. Obviously, there are exceptions and complexities (the idea of ‘place’ is not the only thing: witness the emphasis for many on ‘the British way of life’), but the idea of place, ‘our’ location, certainly has a central place in our sensibilities.
My impressions, of course are exploratory only. But if there is anything in them they are indeed relevant for policy – for building, town planning, immigration, education. So, I would argue for a full understanding, we need also to take full account of our own feelings – the ‘vibes’ and dreams and memories of particular places that we know – and become sensitive to the sense-imbued ‘air’ of places.
Taking serious account of one’s own experience – feelings too – has at last become an approved approach. It is true that one must still take care to avoid, tempting though it is, over-romanticising one’s own feelings or ignoring other sources whether relating to a particular locality or the comparative literature: these enable us to pick out the salient features and avoid misleading preconceptions. But for a full understanding of some locality or local feature, taking account of not just observation but personal feelings and emotions should come in too.
Far from being seen as an essentially low-level, lazy, self-indulgent or even narcissistic method, as it might have been in the past, this approach has actually become quite fashionable within certain social science circles. It has been made particularly popular by the concept and practice of so-called ‘reflexive anthropology’: taking seriously, and reporting on the researcher’s own experience (‘experience’ being a valid concept today), a logical extension of the long-established anthropological ‘participant observation’. Let me end then with a very personal example.
The air of Derry
Last summer I went back to Derry. So many memories thronged through all my senses, filling me with my feeling for the ancient and beautiful place founded by a gentle but warlike saint as the ‘oak grove’ (daire), river girt and surrounded by hills, the place where I was born and, in part, grew up.
Derry was founded by St Columba in the 6th century, long surrounded by a strong ring of (still-standing) stone walls, a thriving port for many years, and resettled from London in the seventeenth century (a kind of colonisation – so I understand something of that too from the inside). Derry was used as a naval base during the battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War, it was plagued by the infamous ‘troubles’ of internecine religions for the long post-war years, and is now relatively at peace.
“ I would argue for a full understanding,
we need also to take full account of our
own feelings – the ‘vibes’ and dreams
and memories of particular places that
we know – and become sensitive to the
sense-imbued ‘air’ of places.”
All that, and much more, is true, and necessary to know. But I need to add more. For I and anyone who grew up there will above all remember the feel: the contrast between (what felt like) the bigotry and closemindedness of the Protestants as against the open-to-everything ‘irrationality’ of the Pope-worshipping Catholics and, worst, the need to decide between them. There was the knowledge of killings and blood in the streets; the hatred; the river cutting its cruel division, forever it seemed, through the heart of the settlement. But then – the miracle: a thousand-strong crowd outside the Guildhall, chief building of the city, as the British Prime Minister made his incredible apology for the Bloody Sunday murders and the resultant tears of grief and of forgiveness – who could forget that? The atmosphere of it?
And now – the ‘Peace Bridge’ unites people that the river once divided: the look, feel and experience of it, things that cold-print sources cannot capture. Now I can add to my memories, I remember the gentle taxi-driver in a Derry street, his cab adorned with the insignia of catholic religion and his adherence recognisable from his facial expressions and unconscious body language (anyone brought up in Derry wouldn’t need an instant to know): without making any big point of it he mentioned that he had ‘just popped into the nearby Presbyterian church before work to say a wee prayer’. I was bereft of words but – a Protestant and not my thing really –agreed to ‘say a wee prayer’ in return: a revolution of feeling as much as of hard ‘reality’ (though maybe those are not so different). All that is now Derry.
The images too have a tale to tell: the community-made murals that replace the old pictorial incitements to hatred and murder; the statue with hands reaching out across the divisions – divisions still there, rich too in themselves, but now accepted, no longer the font of attack. The nostalgia of the ‘Londonderry air’, common to all, still hangs – and beautifully – just as the old antagonistic songs are still sung, and one-side Orange bands play at times in the streets. But now they do it (mostly) without the hatred or the militaristic intent of the past. It is true that of course we still see the impulses that human nature is ever prone to – will they ever fade totally? But there is a shared pride in the historic city that has resumed its sense of community and reconciliation.
All that too is – must be – part of the existence of Derry. How could we appreciate its history without some awareness of these intangible qualities? How we see and feel a place is indeed one dimension of its nature. Could a historian or a
policy geek give a full account without some feel for all this?
Peace Bridge, Derry Derry City
‘Hands Across the Divide’
reconciliation statue in Derry, by Maurice Harron (Credit: Tourism Ireland)
“ And now – the ‘Peace Bridge’ unites
people that the river once divided:
the look, feel and experience of
it, things that cold-print sources
cannot capture.”
Derry Stone Walls
So…?
I live, as I say, in the new-old city of Milton Keynes. I love it here. Here, with its multi-coloured memories, in this, my place.
It is a city whose planners it seems, were indeed aware of the multi-sensory dimensions of place. We have the parks, lakes and rivers, unlike in some other cities not concreted over for new dwellings – though, true, it is indeed a constant battle in which the inhabitants’ pride in place must continually be in play. We have the great cathedral of trees; the Peace Pagoda; theatre and art gallery and small places for the local bands to practice; roundabouts and grid roads and grass verges; statues in the parks and city centre; small ‘villages’ nested with their timbered pubs and a scattering of thatch amidst the entrepreneurial city; books and exhibitions of maps and photographs and audio recordings from the past; a scent garden for the blind and not so blind; churches old and new – the city centre dome is an amazement topped by a cross visible from all angles – and playgrounds for the children;
References
Davies, Charlotte A. (1998) Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others (ASA Research Methods in Social Anthropology), London: Routledge.
Etherington, Kim (2004) Becoming a Reflexive Researcher – Using Our Selves in Research, London: Jessica Kingsley.
Feld, Steven (2012) Sound and Sentiment, Durham NC:
Duke University Press.
Finnegan, Agnes (1992) Reaching for the Fruit: Growing up in Ulster, Milton Keynes: Callender Press.
Finnegan, Ruth (1989/2007) The Hidden Musicians,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press / Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Finnegan, Ruth (1998) Tales of the City, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Finnegan, Ruth (2015) Black Inked Pearl,
New York: Garn Press.
Finnegan, Ruth (2017) (ed.) Entrancement. Consciousness in Dreaming, Music and the World; Cardiff: University of Wales Press (in press).
Hirsch, Eric (ed.) (1995) The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Levy, Andrea (2004) Small Island, Tinder Press.
Low, Setha M. (ed.) (2003) The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture, Wiley-Blackwell.
Pahl, Kate (2017) in Finnegan 2017 (in press). Taylor, Denny (2015) Rosie’s Umbrella, New York:
Garn Press.
Tilley, Christopher, and Kapferer, Bruce. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments, London: Berg.
Turner, Victor and Bruner, Edward M. (1986) The Anthropology of Experience, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
new houses and apartments that are warm and (sometimes) beautiful, building memories for their dwellers; and all this never far from a green or a river. True, there is the thunder of traffic or, like anywhere, traffic jams, only partly mitigated by the clever roundabouts, the hoot of horns amidst the clanking of migrating goose wings in the loom and fragrance of the sky. Then, by now its football songs (‘The Dons’…) and their stadium; and, forever, its miraculous gold-red tawny trees, millions of them – what foresight by the city builders – by the roads in the autumn.
All this, and in all its complexities, is Milton Keynes. But not just Milton Keynes or new cities. A greater
awareness of the richly multi-coloured notion of place leads in to a fuller, more informed, policy for the planning and appreciation of the full sense of ‘places’ new or old, large or little. We need to think, as did those now not so recent but far-sighted tree-planting planners of the city of Milton Keynes and garden cities, of what we are about.
Inscribed Texts by Gerry Loose
18Lat.55.840 Long.–4.267
The Hidden Gardens
Commentary by Dr Heather H. Yeung
Assistant Professor in English Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara
Gerry Loose’s Inscribed Texts (2002) are poems
that exist both of and in a specific place. Created
for Glasgow’s Hidden Gardens as a part of an
inaugural wider project to integrate art into the
gardens’ overall design, Loose’s poems are carved
into a series of sandstone waymarkers. Each
sandstone block was sourced from the site itself.
There are five waymarkers; five poems. Although each
waymarker is self-contained in its poetic expression, the five are also thematically interrelated, and may be read as a single work stretching across various stones and areas of the Hidden Gardens (much as we read some poems in stanzas). The number of waymarkers also relates, significantly, to the symbolic importance of 5 across various cultures:
the 5 pillars of Islam and the 5 sacred Hindu trees; to this we can also add the significance of 5 as a Prime; the 5 wounds of Christ, the 5 books of the Torah, 5 sacred Sikh symbols; the Khamsa, the 5 senses, the 5 elements (in Classical Greek and East Asian traditions); the list goes on. The choice of significance is up to the passenger through the gardens. And so, even though interpretive act here is bound up in a very specific place – Glasgow city centre’s Hidden Gardens – it also reaches out towards a universal significance, and gestures towards the multiple multicultural frames of reference brought to bear on single objects or acts in cities everywhere today. Just as the poems are borne by a particular form (sandstone blocks of varying roughness and
smoothness), and this sandstone solidity sits within a specific place, framing, in some strangely reversed way, our view of the surroundings, the poems are also written in a specific form. The form used – the circle poem – creates a continuum broken only by the reader’s changed or broken perspective. Yet, the meaning of the circle poem is not as enclosed as a cursory glance as its form would perhaps imply.
Each of Loose’s poems has a certain fluidity about it. They turn and force their reader into movement alongside with them:
water below sky around
not only makes us pay attention to the matter upon which we stand and by which we are surrounded (paradoxically, earth and air!), but plays out something all-encompassing, something hypnotic, as the circle poem here neither completes nor divides its statement:
below sky around water below sky around…
In reading the circle poems, alternative meanings can be made with changed starting-points:
trees are mountains can as easily be are mountains trees
Loose’s Inscribed Texts are evidence of the power of the carefully placed written word within a given space. They demand attention, but can just as easily be walked straight past and ignored. They point towards, frame, mark, and create a discreet sense of place within a given landscape, whilst also allowing the landscape to open out in a different way from that place. With each reader, they expand into a multiplicity of different interpretative possibilities. In doing so, they provoke conversation. With each season, they change in appearance. With time, they become further integrated into their surrounding landscape (note the moss on some of the waymarkers, and the effects of weathering can be seen on the lettering of others). The waymarkers have changed this place, and, now, change with it, and demand of their reader (or observer) to mark, too, these changes from their own points of view, in the Hidden Gardens and of themselves.
Further Reading
Gerry Loose, Printed on Water
(Shearsman, 2007)
www.thehiddengardens.org.uk /artwork-of-the-hidden-gardens.php
heart seeing eye playing muddles up the normal verbs attributed to the organs mentioned, but is also seeing eye playing heart, bringing to the forefront the different sorts of affective and poetic play that Loose’s circle poems evoke, and the fact that ‘vision’ in and of place is not only empirical (charted by the eye) but also emotional (observed by the heart)
And for many of them, meaning changes with angle of vision: not hidden is the only part visible from one angle of a circle poem that reads not hidden dreamed (or, dreamed not hidden); conversely, if viewed fully from the ‘dreamed’ perspective, ‘not hidden’ is invisible is the way unseen works in a similar way – with unseen unseen from some angles, and is the way from others; when read in full with shifting clauses this circle poem is at once a statement and a question, mirroring the swithering manner in which we move when the way is not immediately visible to us.